chimera

In the old land of Lycia there roamed a monster that should not have been able to exist at all. It was called the Chimera, and it was three beasts stitched into one impossible body: a lion in front, a goat rising from its back, and a serpent for a tail. Worst of all, it breathed fire, and it laid waste to the countryside, burning fields and devouring flocks and herdsmen alike.

No ordinary weapon could stand against a thing that could not even be looked at without flinching. Whole villages fled. The king of the land, at his wits' end, sent a young hero named Bellerophon to kill it, half hoping the task would kill the hero instead.

But Bellerophon had caught and tamed the winged horse Pegasus, and on Pegasus' back he could do what no man on foot could. He rose into the air above the fire-breathing monster, out of reach of its flames and its claws, and struck at it from the sky. He fixed a lump of lead to his spear and drove it into the Chimera's throat, and the creature's own fiery breath melted the lead, and the molten metal ran down and killed it from the inside.

The monster died, but its strangeness outlived it. A lion, a goat, and a snake in one skin: nothing in nature is made that way. The Chimera became the very picture of the unnatural, the mismatched, the impossible thing dreamed up out of parts that could never truly join.

From that we get chimera. Today it means a wild fancy, an illusion, a hope so far-fetched it can never come true, the kind of beautiful, monstrous, impossible thing that exists only in the imagination.